


Five Kisses, no Missus

by Lemonboynme



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: 5 Times, Angst, Fluff, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-23
Updated: 2016-09-23
Packaged: 2018-08-16 19:28:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8114656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lemonboynme/pseuds/Lemonboynme
Summary: A kiss can mean many things. Dorian find this out the hard way.





	

I.)

 His first kiss is at his 16th name day party. His father had asked him warmly to invite any friends he had made in the circle, and invite he had. The only friend had been Demetrius, the other mages leaving him essentially alone. They were either too afraid to upset an up and coming magister or too annoyed by Dorian’s antics. Demetrius had agreed and they spent the night playing the game fast and loose, giggling behind their hands as they shared private jokes in the Pavus mansion. Trying to guess who was wearing smalls and who had gone without, laughing louder with every glass of wine. He caught his father beaming at him, proud his son had completed his harrowing. After enduring not one but two demons that had begged and pleaded with him, offering everything and he had denied them with barely a thought. Demons were rather slow sometimes, not catching on fast enough that he would never be tempted by sumptuous breast and high breathy female voice. 

 

Now he had stepped another year towards his age of majority and he was miles ahead of his older, more experienced peers. His father had no reason to be anything but proud of him. That was until Dorian had finished his fourth glass of wine, the sweet red seemed to heat his cheeks more when Demetrius stood closer. His face stained with a permanent blush as the older boy leaned into his space, saying something about how lord whatever had lost his toupee sometime ago and no one had pointed out the loss. Its absence left a rather shiny bald spot on display.

 

It was the closeness, the laughter shared of a mutual joke and the adrenalin of such a huge party in his honor that made him nod fervently when Demetrius quietly asked if Dorian would like some air. Giddiness and childish hope lead him to his next mistake. Dorian should have lead his friend to the balcony to make fun of the drunkards who slumped outside in the humid night. But he didn’t. Instead he motioned for Demetrius to follow him into the house, to Dorians rooms.

 

There was barely a moment before he closed the door to the hallway, the noise from the party muffling completely before he was shoved roughly into the wood of his newly closed door. Demetrius leaned close, hands fisting in the front of his robe with a terrible glint in his eyes that Dorian immediately adored. His heart had felt like it was going to implode as a quiet question drifted to his ear, large fingers flexing where they held him as Demetrius loomed closer.

 

“Can I kiss you?” Demetrius was so kind and quiet, far too good for him but that didn’t stop him from surging upwards and awkwardly smashing their lips together. It was absolutely glorious, it was horrendous and far too wet for a first kiss but it felt like benediction.They ended up curled around each other on Dorian’s couch, kissing softly and deeply in turns. It was like this that some slave girl had opened the door, catching them.

 

His father’s face was thunderous at the breakfast table the next day. He informed Dorian stiffly that Demetrius was taken back to the circle that morning and he would be continuing his education in Minrathous rather than Quarius.

II.

There had been many men after that, some were young men of the circle eager to use Dorian’s mouth but never for kissing. Even whores when his father had insisted on the charade of marrying him off. Though the only kisses he knew from his first were either rough or insincere. Sometimes they were both when his partner was simply too filled with lust to make it a good kiss. It didn’t matter; there were none who would kiss him in the way he wanted. So he fucked them, let them fuck him and took his pleasure where could. His father never caught him again but it didn't mean that the majority of Tevinter altus knew just how much he loved being on his knees. Dorian didn't mind the tittering, mostly because he knew that most of their husbands had let him fuck them in messy dark corners into messier orgasms.

 

He lived those years feeling as if his very soul was shrinking from lack of use, he grew cold, colder than those who had used him before. Then he had entered into the apprenticeship of one Magister Alexius and his son Felix saved him with a simple kiss. In the years that followed, he had once admitted to Felix that he was something like a handsome prince who had kissed the frog and made the poor thomg human once more.

 

Felix was a remarkable man, one who hadn’t deserved the taint of associating with Dorian but still gladly took up a place as Dorian’s closest friend and confidant. Those were the hard years, where he spent equal amounts of time trying to appease his father and infuriate him. Doing everything he asked and only refusing things to do with marrying him off. Ranging from protests about finishing his apprenticeship first, to completely shooting down any possible matches with a fiery opposition. He would have torn himself to pieces by then if it hadn’t been for Felix.

 

Felix brought him back to life, reminded him that there could be people in his life that were not father or mother to him. That he could love a person wholly and without shame. Felix was that for him, a brother his parents had never given him. Felix doled out affection like it was the most natural thing. He would bring Alexius and Dorian water or occasionally hot cocoa when they worked long nights. Padding quietly into the room to pat his father on the cheek, maybe giving him a quick hug before giving Dorian one as well. Soft kisses he pressed into Dorian’s hair when he found himself wondering into the estate library while Dorian camped in an overstuffed arm chair, head stuffed in a book.

 

Dorian used to count those kisses. He tucked away the memory of easy affection for when arguments grew heated and his father’s hand inevitably struck his cheek, effectively ending any argument that may have been raging. He is 24 when he returns the gesture, lips pressing to hard into Felix’s newly shorn hair, the surgeon working desperately to close the puncture wound in his stomach while tears stream down the younger man’s face. Alexius is in the corner, weeping while he mourns his wife and the taint that has marked his only son for death.  

 

III.)

 

The search for a way to stop the corruption nearly killed both Dorian and Alexius. He stops answering his father’s letters, unwilling to deal with something so trifle as marriage and his orientation when his best friend was dying. They hit a wall; He and Alexius have it out in the front court yard and Dorian storms off before they do something they would regret and before Felix could offer his warning against returning home.

 

His father greets him at the door, surprisingly sympathetic about Felix’s fate despite the fact that he knew his father believed him involved with Felix. Felix was something he refused to spoil with his hands, but his love for his friend was clear and his father saw that well enough. Halward does something strange before they go to bed that night, restless and eyes red from crying Dorian does not take it as the warning he should have. Dorian receives two light kisses from his father on either cheek, something that was strangely Orlesian but still opened a yawning chasm of warmth inside Dorian’s chest. He had thought Halward had meant it as something to calm a grieving child, but he had truly been saying good bye. The answer as to why he was saying goodbye came in the morning.

It is the next day when he’s informed his father would like to meet him in his study, where he’s hit over the head and stabbed by blades slathered in mage pain. The pain of his wounds is nothing compared to the sick feeling of not being able to access his magic. No fireballs to melt the faces off the apprentices that picked him up, too dizzy from the concussion he was now sporting to support himself. Then his fate was to be roughly dragged through his childhood home to one of the uglier guest quarters that had several brand new locks.

 

They kept him there, windows boarded and drugged for nearly a month when his father seemed it fit to call upon him. More accurately put, to have his apprentices drag Dorian to the study. The smell of blood flooded his noise as his father explained what he intended to do. His mother was there, she squeezed one of his bound hands before turning on her heal. Skirts lifted to protect them from the blood traced delicately into the floor.

 

His father raises a hand to heal him, cool magic washing through him washing away the headache, the tiredness and the mage bane. There had been no time and no choice in the moments before they restrained him in some other way. He did not recognize his voice as his own as an animalistic scream tore from his throat. There was no spell on his lips only the madness of a trapped animal whose worst fears had come true as they were trapped by the wolf.

 

In the end Dorian escapes. He escapes as everyone desperately tries to put out the fire that’s consuming an entire wing of their mansion. He escapes on one of his father’s most expensive steeds with the staff and the traveling bag he had snatched from his room before dashing away from the inferno he had made out of his childhood home.

IV.)

 

He returned to Felix, though it was the kiss of a homeless woman in the streets of Redcliffe that made him feel human once more. Mostly he felt he had lost a portion of his sanity the moment he realized that the man who had raised him was going to preform blood magic on him. The man who raised him had used his grief over a friend’s illness to take him prisoner in the home he had grown up in. Blood magic was the resort of a weak mind. A mantra that repeated itself as Dorian drove him to exhaustion, stopping only so that the horse could rest.

 

When he had been certain he wasn’t followed he’d sent a raven to Felix and received one back that he and Alexius had traveled to Redcliffe in an attempt to find a way to contain the sickness. So Redcliffe was where he went. He didn’t feel alive, a corpse animated only in the farce of living. It was something that Dorian knew too much of not to imagine. He wasn’t paying attention when a frail hand had reached toward him, holding her hand open for alms.

 

He saw her and realized he had little to give her. So little to give anyone, he had nothing that they wanted anyway. It had been the best and worst horribly impulsive decision to tell her to wait where she was and walk toward and stall run by some masked Orlesian. He sold the crest that had been his constant companion since he had left for the circle. His birthright earned him a large pile of coin, the Orlesian fuck was nearly crying in delight once he got his hands on it. He moved to the next stall buying a basket of breads and cheeses and to the next where he paid for a warm and practical looking coat.

 

Returning to the old woman, he relished in the immediate effect that this would have on her life. She would have food and a warm coat for her shoulders. Seemingly more effective than spending years attempting to manipulate society to do much of the same but for everyone. It felt good and Dorian always knew he was a selfish man. She pulled him down with a surprising amount of force and kissed his forehead and both cheeks with such tenderness that she was not the only one left with tears in her eyes. He pressed a few more silvers into her hand before he continued his search for where Felix was staying.

 

The manic, deep hurt he felt wasn’t gone but he was reminded that there were bigger things to do than to nurse his own hurts. There were people suffering, Felix was suffering and he would seek refuge in the work that was yet to be done.

V.)

 

Those deep hurts seemed to have only grown in time. When he sees his father again in the shitty tavern on the edge of Redcliffe it took all of him not to cry. The desire to scream like a child and to beg the question of why surged through him. Dorian knew why, a legacy more important to him than his only son. He knew but he could not reconcile the man who had taught him to hate blood magic, the man who loved him was the same man who risked destroying him for the sake of a legacy. It killed him.

 

In the end he stayed to listen, forcing himself not to resent Adaar and how much the warrior didn’t know. Sure, he knew that Dorian loved his father despite everything but there were some things you didn’t forgive. He was grateful for Cullen’s presence as well; the commander had squeezed his shoulder when his father uttered some nonsense about driving him to the inquisition. It provided a much needed physical anchor to focus on long after the hand had returned to the pommel of his sword.

 

The following tirade he let loose was more cathartic that anything he had experienced in the three years since his father had tried to trap him inside his own mind. He took vindictive pleasure in how he saw that Cullen had a hand seated firmly on the pommel of his sword, a snarl on his lips as tears stung Dorian’s eyes. Adaar had drawn himself up to full height, seven feet of terrifying power. The iron caps on the man’s twisting horns glinted almost sinister in the light of the tavern. Sera, bless her, had a jar of her bees gripped tight in her hand. Her approach as unsubtle as it got but no less appreciate as he raged against his father.

 

It occurred to him as he cursed and spat at his father’s legacy, his father scolding him as if a child that the three people standing behind him were his friends. They cared about Dorian, Cullen had growled inhuman and angry in a way that Adaar never had when his father sought to beg his forgiveness without bothering to apologize. Adaar had put a large but gentle hand on his lower back as he lead him out of the tavern, leaving his father standing there while Sera hurled names like colorful rocks in the direction of his father.

 

Once they were far away enough, outside Redcliffe and catching a ride with the caravan they had road in with a few days prior, far enough he felt only a little like he would shake apart was when Cullen pulled him into a tight hug. Dorian hugged him back just as fiercely, yearning for the sickness of his grief and fear and the poisoned love he held for his father to disappear under the uncommon affection of his friend.

 

Sera held his hand once they climbed into the back of a wagon that smelled strongly of Druffalo, handing him a bottle of wine and uncorking another for herself with her teeth rather than relinquish her grip. She made fun of him for doing the same and Dorian was so grateful for the lividity that he squeezed her hand tighter and held back tears that were completely unrelated to meeting his father and the unpleasant memories he had brought with him.

 

He had felt worn down, frazzled to his limit but oh so warmed by the thought of how ready his friends had been to face off a magister simply because he had almost done harm to Dorian. It was more than he could have hoped for. There was purpose in his life and he had people who cared for him. By the fire that night Adaar didn’t bother with the usual vague flirtation or the smiles that made his rather terrifying face look like a boy no more than ten which never failed to melt Dorian’s black little heart. Instead his friend seemed content to gather him close, arm around his waist as Sera did her very best to give Cullen a wealth of detail from the last time she bedded the pretty red head serving wench back in Skyhold.

 

The Tal-vashoth seemed content to look into Dorian’s eyes, to lean in close and allow Dorian to make the final movement by the fire. Closing the distance between their lips, it was soft and chaste. It was a quiet meeting of chapped lips that held so much more than simple affection or not so simple lust. It felt, cheesily enough like finding a home. He had found family and a purpose in those around him. Who’s to say his new home could not be a person as well. The kisses that followed felt like showing far too much of his hand. Heart on his sleeve for all too see and he couldn’t bring himself to really care as it were. Too tired and emotionally numb to fall back on old fears, too done with the world to deny the difference that his Inquisitor could make with a kiss.  


**Author's Note:**

> I havn't posted in a long time so I beg for your kindness. I'm grateful for feedback but this was mostly a stress outlet when i was stuck pondering the nature of kisses this week.


End file.
